Importing your data into Azure is the first step. With Microsoft Codename “Data Transfer” Lab you can now transfer your data into Azure using any standard modern browser. The data transfer service transports files up to 200 MB in size through an HTTP SSL connection. You’ll need to supply your Windows Live ID credentials and Windows Azure account information to the service. If you don’t have an account, click here to sign up for a free trial.

One of the goals we have for this lab is to take the complexity out of typical operations, such as loading structured data in CSV and Excel files into SQL Azure. In the interest of optimizing your time and resources, we’re providing simple parsing, type discovery and conversion over your files. You can choose to keep the defaults we provide, or override them. The transfer service first analyzes the file and presents you with our best guess. You’ll be able to change the table name, column names, and data types before saving the file to SQL Azure.

We’ll be evolving this lab over the next few months. We plan to support larger file sizes, multi-file transfer, simple conversions for more types of files into SQL Azure, and reliable transfer that handles dropped connections. If you have feedback or suggestions, please feel free to contact us directly at labsupport@microsoft.com, take the survey, or add your suggestions and issues to the SQL Azure Labs Support Forum. We look forward to hearing from you.